THE STUDENT.(Hillary Clinton)

On January 26, 1993, six days after becoming First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton paid a private visit to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The encounter took place at Onassis's Fifth Avenue apartment, where lunch was served in the living room, overlooking Central Park. The two women had met only a few times before, but Clinton had sought out Onassis as one of the few women in America who could understand what she was going through. They talked for two hours about, among other things, the dangers faced by charismatic leaders and the challenge of raising children in the public eye. Eventually, the conversation turned to clothes. Nearly everything that Clinton had done in her first days in the White House had been criticized, from her decision to move into an office near the President's to her choice of hats. (The derby-like creation that she wore to her husband's swearing-in made her look, according to one news account, as if a flying saucer had just landed on her head.) Clinton asked Onassis whether she should hand herself over to a team of fashion consultants, as many had urged. Onassis responded with horror. "You have to be you," she told the First Lady.

The advice seemed obvious, but no sooner had Clinton returned to Washington than she ignored it. She had already been named to head the President's task force on health-care reform, an unprecedented appointment for a First Lady, and dozens of journalists were competing to land the first interview with her in her new position. Instead of granting it to a political columnist, or even to a medical reporter, Clinton chose to sit down with a food writer, Marian Burros, of the Times. The Times ran Burros's piece, which focussed on the First Lady's decision to shift the emphasis of the White House menu from French to American-style cuisine, on the front page. Clinton posed for the accompanying photograph in a high-fashion, shoulder-baring Donna Karan evening gown.

There are not supposed to be any second acts in American politics. Either because voters are impatient or because they are simply inattentive, a perception, once fixed in the public imagination--Michael Dukakis in a tank, Gary Hart on the Monkey Business--tends to crowd out the possibility of all others. A reputation for disingenuousness would seem to be particularly damaging, since any attempt to dislodge it is bound to be construed as another piece of insincerity.

Depending on how you reckon, Clinton's second act began either three years ago, with her election to the United States Senate, or somewhat further back, with the revelation of her husband's infidelity. It reached a triumphant peak this summer, with the publication of "Living History," her extended meditation on the tribulations of being First Lady. Such is Clinton's treatment of her subject, which is to say herself, that when trouble arises it is almost always from a surfeit of good intentions. "With Jackie's tacit permission, I determined to continue having fun," Clinton writes of her encounter with Onassis, and she ascribes the flap over her dress to the narrow imagination of her critics: "I cared about the food I served our guests, and I also wanted to improve the delivery of health care for all Americans." The memoir has sold nearly a million and a half copies in the United States alone, more than recouping the eight million dollars that Simon & Schuster paid for it. (It has also been published abroad in thirty-five languages.) In a circular sort of way, its sales have no doubt benefitted from, and at the same time contributed to, the recent state of speculation about Clinton and the Presidential race.

How Hillary Clinton, whom many members of her husband's Administration still credit with some of the worst decisions of his tenure, could have pulled off such a remarkable recovery is mysterious in many of the same ways that her earlier difficulties were. One possible explanation is that Clinton has far better judgment when it comes to her own career than when it comes to her husband's. Another--the one Clinton proposes in "Living History"--is that her troubles as First Lady were all just the result of a terrible misunderstanding.

Senator Clinton and her staff occupy the same L-shaped suite, on the fourth floor of the Russell Senate Office Building, that her predecessor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and his staff worked out of for twenty-two years. Clinton's office, which is at one end of the L, is spacious and airy, with a marble fireplace that holds four decoratively stacked logs. The room is painted a pale shade of daffodil, with drapes and upholstery to match, and projects what might best be described as reserved femininity. On the chairs, there are little needlepoint pillows, one stitched with a copy of the cover of Clinton's 1996 book, "It Takes a Village," another with the words "Senator Hillary." Like most politicians' offices, Clinton's is filled with photographs, but instead of the usual shots of the senator posing with luminaries, her collection includes a picture of Robert Kennedy, who also served as a senator from New York even though he wasn't from the state; a moody portrait of her husband, with his back to the camera, gazing out the windows of the Oval Office; and a composite picture of her sitting with Eleanor Roosevelt. The suite is not considered particularly desirable--Moynihan had many opportunities to upgrade, but chose not to--and Clinton ended up with it because, under the elaborate rules governing seniority, when she first entered the Senate she ranked below several other lawmakers who had entered on the same day. (Extra points go to those who have previously served as governors or congressmen, but the system gives no credit to former First Ladies.) After Moynihan retired, he came back to visit the office and pronounced the place a lot more yellow.

One morning in late May, I went down to Washington to spend a day with Clinton. When I met up with her, at around 9:30 a.m., she was sitting in her office, sipping some sort of frozen coffee concoction through a straw. Clinton is not at her best early in the day, and she looked as if she were struggling to wake up when a group of entrepreneurs-cum-environmentalists called E2 was ushered in. The group included Robert Fisher, a former president of the Gap, and its concerns ranged from overfishing of the world's oceans to the Bush Administration's legislative agenda. Clinton, sipping her coffee, agreed with the group's gloomy views about aquatic life and the President's proposals--"The Administration is taking every opportunity they can to weaken the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act," she said--and, finally, voiced the hope that "this will be the first of many such meetings." Then she excused herself to attend a press conference outside the Capitol.